Lawrence Taub (1936–2018) was a futurist and the author of the book The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and The Last Caste (Clear Glass Press, 2002, ISBN 0-931425-37-9). [1]
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
Taub was born and grew up in Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward ghetto in 1936, of Jewish ancestry. He received his B.A. in History from New York University (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), with minors in Political Science and French. Next he studied at Harvard Law School. Later, Taub chose not to return to Harvard University School of Law from a two-year leave of absence. Instead, he went to the Sorbonne (University of Paris) to earn a certificate to teach French.
Newark is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County. As one of the nation's major air, shipping, and rail hubs, the city had a population of 285,154 in 2017, making it the nation's 70th-most populous municipality, after being ranked 63rd in the nation in 2000.
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, typically as a result of social, legal, or economic pressure. The term was originally used in Venice to describe the part of the city to which Jews were restricted and segregated. However, early societies may have formed their own versions of the same structure; words resembling "ghetto" appear in the Hebrew, Yiddish, Italian, Germanic, Old French, and Latin languages. Ghettos in many cities have also been nicknamed "the hood", colloquial slang for neighborhood. Versions of ghettos appear across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people.
New York University (NYU) is a private research university originally founded in New York City but now with campuses and locations throughout the world. Founded in 1831, NYU's historical campus is in Greenwich Village, New York City. As a global university, students can graduate from its degree-granting campuses in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, as well as study at its 12 academic centers in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Washington, D.C.
Taub lived and worked in Los Angeles, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Israel, India, Kathmandu, New York City, Munich, and Australia. He eventually settled in Tokyo, where he has lived for 23 of the last 31 years. There he worked as an ESL instructor, free-lance translator from Swedish, Hebrew, German, and Japanese to English, and as a narrator of commercial films. He spoke ten languages with different levels of fluency.
Los Angeles, officially the City of Los Angeles and often known by its initials L.A., is the most populous city in California, the second most populous city in the United States, after New York City, and the third most populous city in North America. With an estimated population of four million, Los Angeles is the cultural, financial, and commercial center of Southern California. The city is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic diversity, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and its sprawling metropolis. Los Angeles is the largest city on the West Coast of North America.
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts.
Copenhagen is the capital and most populous city of Denmark. As of July 2018, the city has a population of 777,218. It forms the core of the wider urban area of Copenhagen and the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Copenhagen is situated on the eastern coast of the island of Zealand; another small portion of the city is located on Amager, and is separated from Malmö, Sweden, by the strait of Øresund. The Øresund Bridge connects the two cities by rail and road.
Taub had attracted attention in Japan since the 1970s, giving lectures and predicting global developments.
The title of the book refers to three models the author developed to give readers a framework for anticipating global future trends. The book has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Spanish. In 2013, the Japanese edition of the book reached the Number 1 spot on the Japanese bestsellers list. In the foreword to the Japanese edition, economist Masanori Kanda referred to Taub as Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker and John Kenneth Galbraith all rolled into one.
In the early 1970s, he collaborated with Sawako Takagi, a co-founder of the Japanese radical feminist movement, on Femintern Press, a feminist publishing project. He later co-authored Multinational Sex, one of the first books exposing the ins and outs of sex tourism.
Sex tourism is travel to a different locale for the sake of sexual activity, particularly with prostitutes. The World Tourism Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations, defines sex tourism as "trips organized from within the tourism sector, or from outside this sector but using its structures and networks, with the primary purpose of effecting a commercial sexual relationship by the tourist with residents at the destination".
Taub’s book presents his macrohistorical discoveries and predicts future trends based on them. He published articles on the subject, presented related papers at conferences and was interviewed on radio and television. He was a member of the World Futures Studies Federation since 1997.
The World Futures Studies Federation is a global non-governmental organization that was founded in 1973 to promote the development of futures studies as an academic discipline.
Utopia and dystopia are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays the setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Many novels combine both, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take, depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other speculative fiction genres, and arguably are by definition a type of speculative fiction.
Gender studies is a field for interdisciplinary study devoted to gender identity and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. This field includes women's studies, men's studies and queer studies. Sometimes, gender studies is offered together with study of sexuality.
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships, and certain subject-object problems in ethics.
Martha Craven Nussbaum is an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is jointly appointed in the law school and the philosophy department. She has a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, feminism, and ethics, including animal rights. She also holds associate appointments in classics, divinity, and political science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown.
Robin Morgan is an American poet, author, political theorist and activist, journalist, lecturer, and former child actor. Since the early 1960s she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful has been widely credited with helping to start the contemporary feminist movement in the US, and was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century." She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and is also known as the editor of Ms. magazine.
Second-wave feminism is a period of feminist activity and thought that began in the United States in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades. It quickly spread across the Western world, with an aim to increase equality for women by gaining more than just enfranchisement.
Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American radical feminist legal scholar. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012 she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Robert Brasillach was a French author and journalist. Brasillach is best known as the editor of Je suis partout, a nationalist newspaper which came to advocate various fascist movements and supported Jacques Doriot. After the liberation of France in 1944 he was executed following a trial and Charles de Gaulle's express refusal to grant him a pardon. Brasillach was executed for advocating collaborationism, denunciation and incitement to murder. The execution remains a subject of some controversy, because Brasillach was executed for "intellectual crimes", rather than military or political actions.
Marilyn French was a radical feminist American author.
Richard H. Minear is a retired Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He taught a survey course of Japanese history and a Hiroshima seminar. Minear got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. He is best known for his book about the Tokyo war crimes trials, Victors' Justice, He has lived in Japan for many years and translated Japanese works into English.
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. is an award-winning writer, writing coach and counselor. German-born and Paris-educated, she now lives in California. Her recent memoir Kiss Me Again, Paris: A Memoir was a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist and won an International Book Award. Her offices are in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jean-Marc Coicaud is a French and American legal and political theorist focusing among other things on global issues. He is Professor of Law and Global Affairs, Director of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers University, and a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea . Over the years he has lived and worked in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. His professional trajectory has combined serving as a policy practitioner at the national, regional, and global levels, and as a scholar and professor in academia.
Frédéric Martel is a French writer, researcher and journalist. His most famous pieces of work are The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968, Mainstream, "Smart" and De la culture en Amérique, a book about cultural policies and industries in the United States, which was featured on the cover of the New York Times art section in 2006. NYT's journalist Alan Riding wrote : "In Culture in America, a 622-page tome weighty with information, Martel challenges the conventional view in France that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad".
Jessie Shirley Bernard was a sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras. Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award. Jessie Bernard was a prolific writer, having published 15 sole-authored books, 9 co-authored books, over 75 journal articles, and over 40 book chapters.
Richard Paul Taub is an American sociologist noted for his research on urban, rural, and community economic development. He is a faculty member of the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology and Department of Comparative Human Development and is also the Paul Klapper Professor in the Social Sciences. Taub has served as a consultant for many social enterprises, research institutions and community development organizations such as the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative, the National Community Development Initiative, and the National Opinion Research Center. He advised the South Shore Bank and the Shorebank Corporation from 1973-2007. His professional and academic concentrations include entrepreneurship, microloan programs, economic development, poverty, social change, the sociology of India, public policy initiatives, the evaluation of social programs, and the role of honor in generating behavioral outcomes. His students include Peter Dreier and Nicole Marwell; he also worked very closely with notable sociologists Michael Burawoy, Mary Patillo and Reuben May when they were students. Taub is the recipient of numerous academic awards, research grants and fellowships such as the University of Chicago Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2004), as a Distinguished Visitor at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and as a Resident Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University (1997–98).
Cindy Patton is an American sociologist and historian specializing in the history of the AIDS epidemic. A former faculty member at Temple University and Emory University, she currently teaches at Simon Fraser University, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture, and Health from 2003 to 2014. Her work has appeared in Criticism, the Feminist Review, and the International Review of Qualitative Research, and she co-edited a special edition of Cultural Studies on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
The Industries of the Future is a 2016 non-fiction book written by Alec Ross, an American technology policy expert and the former Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State. Ross is also a senior fellow at Columbia University, a former night-shift janitor, and a Baltimore teacher. Ross launched a campaign for the Governor of Maryland in 2017. The book explores the forces that will change the world in robotics, genetics, digital currency, coding and big data.
